ABCs at the Movies: The Doubles Round!

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IMDb Comment excerpt: The main draw in this film for me was Grayson Hall, who portrays Miss Maxwell, Editor of Vogue magazine--a character so closely based on Director William Klein's former boss Diana Vreeland, it's amazing Vreeland didn't sue for libel. Grayson Hall was flown over specially from America to do this. Try to get the original French language version--she spoke French and her accent, and delivery, are priceless. (She referred to the experience acerbically as "Hell, honey!") The film's eponymous star Dorothy MacGowan was chosen at random from a crowd shot of Beatles girls welcoming the Fab Four at a New York airport. MacGowan stands at the center of a wildly gyrating scenario that satirizes pretty much everything in mid Sixties French society that is or isn't nailed down--politics, fashion, the media, the idealization of rural life and French traditions--taking frequent detours into fantasy sequences and even including some animated segments that must have helped inspire the animated interludes in the original Monty Python series. The score by Michel Legrand has some brilliant moments, particularly during the opening sequence featuring sheet metal fabricated fashions; the rest of the film never quite lives up to the promise of this inaugural tour de force.

[Fran]

AKA Russkiy kovcheg



From IMDb:

2000 Actors. 300 years of Russian History. 33 Rooms at the Hermitage Museum. 3 Live Orchestras. 1 Single Continuous Shot.

Told in one fluid shot, a tale which floats like a dreamlike journey through the majestic spaces of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, engaging real and imagined characters from Russian and European history. The nameless protagonist, a 19th-century French diplomat, guides the audience through a lost, sumptuous dream that was the Enlightenment period. The film, staged among some of the Western Art tradition's greatest masterpieces, climaxes in a pageant of color, motion, and music. For (director Alexandr) Sokurov, the Hermitage -- home to generations of Romonovs and repository of so much Russian history -- is the ark of the Russian soul, guarding it affectionately until the world sees better days.

Here's the trailer, which looks pretty amazing:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J--TDEHizVA[/youtube]
Time:  2:18

[Meryl]

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Exerpt from TWITCH review:
Based on the novel by Mitch Cullin, Tideland tells the story of Jeliza-Rose, a young girl who has retreated into a vigorous fantasy life to compensate for, to put it bluntly, the extreme shittiness of her family life. Her father is a washed up musician, burned out on drugs, still using heavily, with an absolutely inexplicable fixation with Vikings in general and Jutland in particular. Jeff Bridges plays him as an utter madman and while he’s fascinating to watch, and Bridge’s best character in years, and much loved by his young daughter you absolutely would not want this man for a father, particularly not after watching him have his little girl prepare a hit of heroin for him. Jeliza-Rose’s mother, as played by Jennifer Tilly, is even worse. Also a major drug user and massively bi-polar good ol’ mom can be screaming at you one moment and kissing you the next. She is completely volatile and unpredictable. Tilly dives into this white trash role with such abandon that it should completely cure any Tilly fetishists out there of your lusts. The woman has never been so unattractive. With a family like this is it any wonder that Jeliza-Rose’s best friends in the world are a quartet of doll heads that she wears on her fingers to engage in lengthy conversations? I think not.

Life takes a difficult turn when Jeliza’s mother dies of a drug overdose and dad, who is talked out of burning mom in a proper Viking funeral pyre right there in the bedroom only when Jeliza-Rose points out that doing so would likely burn the entire building down, takes the girl on the road heading for his childhood home in the prairies. They arrive to find the house neglected, abandoned, a much vandalized but settle in anyway and when dad, too, dies of a drug overdose Jeliza-Rose is left with only his decomposing corpse, her doll heads, the wild haired one eyed madwoman down the way and her brain damaged brother for company. - http://twitchfilm.net/archives/003465.html

[Fran]

From IMDb:

An undertaker and his two friends, who are restaurant owners, drum up business by going out on the town and killing people; the restaurant owners use parts of the bodies for their menu, and the undertaker gets paid by the families to bury the remainder.  Their racket goes awry when two detectives suspect that something isn't quite kosher.

[memento]

From IMDB: Graham is content! He has a just purchased a new house which he can afford due to his successful well okay job which also comes closer to him with a swell chance of picking up a great girlfriend as a bonus feature. Of course he is something of a suck up yuppie and his potential companion Judy Dansig is sex-crazed real estate agent. However his new home has unwanted guest, a disgraced destitute shrink, who sees a chance to carry on the mind games that led him to his current situation. As Graham starts finding pieces of those around him turning up in places like his fridge and with him getting the blame by the law. Graham struggles hard not to lose it, but that isn't easy as the deaths continue and he starts to even doubt his very own sanity!

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From Answers.com:David Blair's WAX, OR THE DISCOVERY OF TELEVISION AMONG THE BEES is the first independent feature film to have been edited on a digital non-linear system. It is also the first film (independent or otherwise) to have been re-formatted as hypertext and posted on the Internet. The New York Times recognized the accomplishment, and ran the article "Cult Film is First on the Internet" in its May 23, 1993 business section.

Director Blair pieced Wax together over a period of six years, writing the film as he edited it, letting creative accidents and "directed random readings at the public library" (as Blair puts it) guide its creation. The result is a work much like the early structuralist films of British director Peter Greenaway, an obsessive, artificial history which has been fastidiously detailed with fragments of real and imagined facts.

The film is set at a flight simulation factory in Alamagordo, New Mexico, where Jacob Maker (Wax's narrator, played by Blair) is a computer programmer. Jacob designs gun sight displays and lives with his wife Melissa near the weapons testing range. He is also a beekeeper, whose "Mesopotamian" bees have been handed down to him from his grandfather, Zoltan. These bees are not ordinary bees; they have the power to put thoughts and images into Jacob's mind, and Jacob soon realizes that he is able to personally identify with the weapons he is helping to create. One day the bees put a special "television" in Jacob's mind. Through the bee television Jacob is subject to a bizarre series of fictions and hallucinations, and is finally lead by the bees to their subterranean home: an enormous cave below the Alamagordo desert. In the cave it is revealed to him that he must actually become a weapon and destroy his "target" in Iraq, before rebirth in a new body.

Wax wears its low-budget origin on its sleeve (it was shot on video) but has enjoyed an art-house reputation due to its wild imagination, its hybrid media existence as part-film-part-Internet-site, and its similarity to works of postmodern literature. Enthusiasts of Greenaway's early films, and readers of Jorges Louis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon, should look this one up. ~ Anthony Reed, All Movie Guide



IMD Comment: This movie is so clearly a christmas classic that i can barely contain myself! Please, make this movie a part of your family's traditional holidayic behavior. Watch it while you wrap the presents, and for a truly quixotic effect, watch it backwards when you unwrap them.

I think that this movie has also taught my "dog" how to talk. I have showed him this movie (privately) over fourteen hundred thousand times and now he can speak. Of course, he doesn't vocalize his speech: he transmits it through the air-but i think that this is still somehow remarkable (I think).

He is telling me to write this: -------- I am so hungry please feed me. Please. I am starving. I need to eat. I am so skinny I that can barely move. Don't hit me anymore. It only hurts and makes me sleepy enough to fall into some reverie. -------- Well, better go feed the pup! (10 out of 10 stars.)

IMDb Comment: Watch it if you think that David Cronenberg's adaptation of Burrough's book, "Naked Lunch," is too linear. If you don't know who William Burroughs is definitely avoid this. This has more to do with surrealist dream films than documentaries.

Delightfully mad IMHO.

Bees, Bouroughs, Book of the Dead. Egyptian myth.

Anti-War Sci-Fi Cyberpunk "My dead wife was in the hive. She fragmented." "They were the dead and vengeance was their life." "I was Cain." "The Planet of Television, transmitting the dead."

It's all pretty schizophrenic. Jacob Maker, beekeeper, in the land of the dead and the garden of eden, Iraq.

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IMDb Comment: Shot in Guy Maddin's black and white faux early-film style, it's a six-minute dance of, well, sissy boys slapping each other. They slap, they cry, they giggle, and you laugh. It's set up, timed, and concluded flawlessly. There are jungle rhythms, beautiful boys, builds and climaxes, and one-of-a-kind cinematography. If you appreciate Guy Maddin at all, if you like camp, or if you think the title "Sissy Boy Slap Party" is funny, there's no reason not to own this and stick in your DVD player whenever you need a quick pick-me-up. Sofa guests seem to love it, too.



6 min. of ...slapping! 
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldFWvHa4Svg[/youtube]

==COMMENT==
IMDB has it as 1995 but the Youtube version I picked is the 2004, Director's Cut...

[Fran]

AKA Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san



From Amazon:

In the ancient Edo period Yaji and Kita are two flamboyant down-and-out samurai who embark on a journey on their souped-up chopper to battle Kita's heroin addiction and contemplate the meaning of their truly bizarre existence. On their way to a healing shrine at Ise they trip through a world where fantasy is reality and the past and present intersect. A surreal blend of slapstick comedy musical and EASY RIDER, YAJI AND KITA heralds the directorial debut of Kankuro Kudo (acclaimed writer of Takashi Miike's ZEBRAMAN) and stars Tomoya Nagase and Shichinosuke Nakamura as the whacked-out titular duo. Marked with a unique brand of cinematic mayhem, this hallucinogenic gay love story is sure to delight and bewilder all who dare journey with them.

From IMDb:

Without a doubt the best movie I have ever seen, in every respect. With excellent effects, to the many themes covered, entertaining, colorful, crazy. I couldn't sit still in my seat and definitely have to grab a copy of this any way I can! It's like BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN meets SAILOR MOON, on speed.

It really shows you that the American film industry don't know anything about the gay community, or for that matter have the ability to produce anything exciting, new, and original. This is a masterpiece; its one of those films that has to power to make you laugh and cry in the same night and enjoy laughing and crying.

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AKA Mayonaka no Yaji-san Kita-san

Thanks for finding this,  I just ordered a copy from Amazon!